The Faces of the Adversary by Roberto Esposito, Zakiya Hanati - 9781509567799

The Faces of the AdversaryThe Enigma of Jacob and the Angel\nAuthor(s): Roberto Esposito, Zakiya Hanati\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd, United Kingdom\nImprint: Polity Press\nISBN-13: 9781509567799, 978-1509567799\nSynopsis\nRoberto Esposito's poetic and historically layered new book draws on a famous, and famously opaque, passage from the Old Testament to shed light on the vision of self and domination that has profoundly shaped western identity and left its mark on western culture.\n\nThese ten lines from Genesis tell the tale of Jacob wrestling with a mysterious adversary on a riverbank. But who exactly is Jacob wrestling with the divine? Evil personified? Absolute otherness? Or his deepest, most subconscious self, repressed and projected? Who, in other words, is the adversary, and what is the enigmatic conflict that binds the two in perpetual conflict? Interchangeable and yet never resolved, these entwined adversaries speak to our great desire to come face.